Book summary “Economical writing”: summary

Introduction

You face a constant struggle with dense academic prose, convoluted sentences, and bureaucratic boilerplate that obscure your actual arguments. Many writers assume that elegant prose is an innate gift bestowed upon a lucky few at birth. You can reject this myth because writing is a learnable professional trade that improves through rigorous self-editing.

Good academic prose requires absolute clarity, active verbs, concrete language, and rigorous self-editing rather than pretentious jargon and bureaucratic boilerplate.

The following chapters examine the nature of writing, practical drafting tools, structural improvements, and specific rules for strong verbs and clean style. You will learn how to transform your drafts by answering several core questions.

• How do you view writing as an instrument of discovery?
• What tools streamline the drafting process?
• How do you eliminate bureaucratic boilerplate from your paragraphs?
• Which specific rules help you choose active verbs over weak nominalizations?

1. The Nature of Writing and Classical Rhetoric

Amateur writers treat criticism of their writing as personal attacks on their character. You might believe that writing is an innate gift from the gods or an unchanging trait. Professionals view writing as a learnable craft and a professional trade. You must take criticism seriously and understand that good writing pays off while bad writing fails because nobody reads it.

Writing is an instrument of thought and discovery rather than a mere conduit for pre-formed ideas, relying on invention, arrangement, and style.

Ideas change radically during expression through the conduit metaphor. You do not merely convey pre-formed thoughts through a pneumatic tube. The act of writing forces you to discover logical flaws, test judgments, and uncover new truths as an epistemological tool.

Galileo used his mastery of Italian prose in his 1632 Dialogo to persuade people about the Copernican system. John Maynard Keynes hypnotized economists with his graceful English prose.

Writing as Thinking

Many traditional schoolroom grammar rules actually damage prose and must be discarded. Rules taught by teachers like Ms. Jones create boring, verbose, and unnatural bureaucratic prose. You must reject these arbitrary constraints.

Avoid these restrictive habits:

• avoiding the first person pronoun 'I';
• never ending a sentence with a preposition;
• strictly prohibiting repeated words;
• following the rigid introductory-summary outline rule known as the Jonesian Arrangement.

Winston Churchill famously mocked the rule against ending sentences with prepositions. He wrote that this is the sort of impertinence up with which he will not put.

The ultimate golden rule of writing is absolute clarity. Clarity is a social matter determined entirely by the reader. If a conscientious reader stumbles or has to reread a sentence, the passage is a failure and must be rewritten. Bad writing wastes time by forcing readers off into irrelevant directions.

The rules of good style are factual observations based on what good writers actually do, rather than abstract logical mandates. In matters of taste and writing style, the only valid standard is the practice of accomplished writers and the reaction of competent readers. Violations of style signal professional incompetence.

Classical Rhetoric

Expository prose relies on classical rhetoric, which divides into three distinct branches. You must master each branch to construct persuasive arguments.

These branches govern your production:

• invention is the framing of substantive arguments through theory and observation;
• arrangement governs the structural flow of the piece through koinoi topoi;
• style handles the phrasing, word choice, and elimination of blemishes.

2. Drafting, Process, and Tools

Waiting until research is finished delays the critical thinking that writing provides. You should capture ideas continuously using a file system of notes, cards, or word processor paragraphs that can be sorted, cut up, and rearranged to find the optimal narrative structure.

Writers should begin drafting early and maintain a rich research file using structured notes and outlines.

C. Wright Mills described the organized set of research cards and folders as The File in 1959.

You can organize your own drafting process with specific steps:

• Set up a file or journal to collect research notes, ideas, and bits of prose.
• Give each note a title or key word representing its gist.
• Print out paragraphs, cut them up with scissors, spread them out, and arrange them into logical stacks.
• Put a number at the beginning of each paragraph leaving wide intervals to allow sorting and reordering.
• Write down thoughts for the next session at the end of each working period to avoid wasting warm-up time.

The Research File

Tools and Audience

Professional writers rely on physical and digital tools, including flexible environments, dictionaries, and commonplace books. You should remain flexible regarding your physical surroundings rather than requiring perfect conditions. A comprehensive dictionary is required to check word origins, usage levels, and nuances. A personal commonplace book helps preserve well-expressed ideas.

The Oxford English Dictionary covers the publication period from 1884 to the present, while the word dreck saw its first English use in 1922.

You can apply professional tools through these habits:

• Use a dictionary to check word origins, pronunciations, and levels of usage.
• Always run a spellchecker before turning in any written work.
• Keep a personal commonplace book or computer file of well-expressed quotations and ideas.

Good writing preserves the rhythms of honest speech and consistently addresses a chosen human audience. You must choose an implied reader—either a real person or a master spirit—and maintain that same level of difficulty throughout the text. Reading prose out loud helps eliminate stiffness and exposes awkward phrasing.

Ernest Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms sixty times, and Honoré Balzac rewrote his novels from printer's proofs up to twenty-seven times.

You can refine your voice with these practices:

• Read your drafts out loud to check rhythm and catch awkward phrasing.
• Imagine a specific real person or master spirit looking over your shoulder while you write.
• Reread admirable prose by authors like the New Yorker or Richard Rorty before revising to capture a good stylistic ring.

3. Eliminating Boilerplate and Improving Structure

You must avoid predictable introductions and boilerplate, ensure every paragraph advances the discussion with a point, and make quantitative displays readable by themselves.

Controlling Tone and Paragraphs

Boilerplate consists of prefabricated and predictable prose, excessive introductions, redundant case repetitions, and academic poses designed to show technical savvy rather than communicate clearly. Prefabricated elements like "This paper..." hooks, background padding, and roadmap paragraphs destroy momentum and signal a lack of effort.

An economist writing about arbitrage writes, "Consider two cities, A and B, trading an asset, X," whereas a clear writer simply asks if New York and London in 1870 sold Union Pacific bonds for the same price.

You must avoid boilerplate with these practices:

• Avoid introductory overtures and elaborate summaries.
• Never start a paper with "This paper..."
• Do not include table-of-contents roadmap paragraphs.
• Never anticipate with phrases like "As we shall see."

The tone depends on the persona the writer takes on. Academic writing often suffers from a pompous persona due to writer insecurity. Furthermore, angry invective and passionate outbursts fail to persuade and merely disgust readers, as Adam Smith noted between 1723 and 1790.

Alasdair MacIntyre noted that telling the absolute truth to a maiden aunt about her new hat would be unkind rather than virtuous.

You should shape your tone using these steps:

• Ask what implied author a piece has in mind.
• Try to explain concepts in a reasonable tone to someone who does not understand, like a roommate or colleague.
• Keep personal opinions to yourself unless relevant.
• Select and delete every "very", "absolutely", and "purely".

Readers lose interest if a paragraph does not deliver a new fact, surprising detail, or fresh quotation. Gerald Graff's technique involves concluding a technical paragraph with a simple sentence that anyone can understand instantly. Block quotations should only be used either to give an opponent a fair hearing before dismantling them or to include a brilliantly expressed insight from another authority.

You can structure your paragraphs with these instructions:

• Ensure every paragraph tells the reader something they do not already know or believe.
• Make the last sentence of a paragraph a simple, street-talk encapsulation of the discussion.

Quantitative Displays

Tables, graphs, and equations must be fully readable by themselves without requiring the reader to cross-reference the main text or decode acronyms. Tables and graphs are a form of writing and must obey rules of clarity, brevity, and audience awareness. Titles should use declarative sentences announcing the theme rather than generic labels. Acronyms, chart junk, and unnecessary decimal precision should be eliminated in favor of rough figures and plain words.

Edward R. Tufte's books demonstrate precepts like mobilizing graphical elements to show data and avoiding pointless chart junk, such as presenting 3.14159256 instead of simple numbers like 3 1/7, or listing annual figures from 1900 to 1980 in full rather than summarizing them.

You must design quantitative displays using these methods:

• Use titles for diagrams and tables that announce their theme, such as "All Conferences Should Happen in the Midwest".
• Use meaningful, spelled-out names for lines, points, and areas instead of alphanumeric codes.

4. Style Rules, Verbs, and Bad Words

Achieve coherence through graceful repetition and transitive linkages, use active verbs, eliminate nominalizations, and strip out vague Latinate nouns and teutonisms.

Coherence in writing is achieved through graceful repetition and transitive sentence linkages rather than heavy transitional adverbs. Transitive writing connects sentences smoothly so that each follows logically from the previous one. Instead of relying on clanking machinery or excessive transitional adverbs like 'indeed' or 'not only... but also', you should achieve cohesion by repeating key words and roots.

• Link sentences by repeating words with the same root in different forms (polyptoton).
• Avoid starting every sentence with heavy linking words or phrases like 'not only... but also'.

Writers must avoid elegant variation, using one word for one concept instead of substituting synonyms for stylistic display. Elegant variation forces the reader to waste attention solving puzzles to figure out if different terms refer to the same thing. You should maintain parallel forms for parallel ideas and repeat the exact term when referring to the same concept across paragraphs.

A paper on economic development used terms like 'industrialization,' 'growing structural differentiation,' 'economic and social development,' and 'revolutionized means of production' within two pages to mean roughly the same thing.

• Express parallel ideas in parallel form.
• When uncertain what word to use, look back at past paragraphs for the same idea and use the exact same word.

Easy writing makes hard reading. You must inspect drafts for redundant words, handle gapping carefully in parallel constructions, keep modifiers close to the words they modify, and utilize English inflections like singulars, plurals, and gender to ensure absolute clarity.

• Test every sentence for redundancy and drop redundant modifiers.
• Put modifiers close to the words they modify.
• Capitalize words to turn them into concrete Proper Nouns when helpful.

Verbs and Concrete Language

Writers should use active verbs and eliminate nominalizations that bury the action inside colorless nouns.

Nominalization occurs when a sentence action is converted into a noun, draining vigor and responsibility from the prose. You should find the actual action in a sentence and express it through a robust verb rather than relying on forms of the verb 'to be' accompanied by abstract nouns. In 1830, Sydney Smith advised running a pen through every other word in composition to gain vigor.

• Find the action in a sentence and express it in a verb.
• Circle every 'is' in your writing and replace it with a real action verb.
• Use imperatives instead of the passive voice to guide readers through complex arguments.

You must eliminate vague Latinate nouns such as concept, data, structure, and process that dilute the meaning of professional prose. Using pretentious nouns creates unnecessary abstraction and hides the actual action or subject. Words like process can usually be struck out completely without changing the meaning of the sentence.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote about launching a process including discussions with advisers regarding nuclear codes.

• Strike out the word process and its preceding the when possible.
• Use idea, notion, or thought instead of concept.
• Use givens or facts rather than misusing data.

You should always choose concrete, singular words over abstract plurals to help the reader instantly visualize the subject. Abstract writing functions like a secret code that forces the reader to translate abstract principles downward, which is much harder than translating a concrete example upward into a general principle. You should prefer Au Bon Pain baguette to bread, bread to widgets, and widgets to X.

• Flee abstractions in business and social science writing.
• Prefer singular words over baggy collections of plurals.
• Use concrete terms like sheep and wheat instead of natural resource-oriented exports.

Writers must untie piled-up compound nouns and adjectives, known as teutonisms, because they force the reader to stop and solve verbal puzzles. English evolved from Germanic roots and does not suit piled-up phrases or excessive possessives. Private wealth-seeking activity becomes clearer when untied into the seeking of wealth.

• Trim sentences when finding multiple stacked nouns and adjectives.
• Untie prose knots by using the preposition of to clarify relationships.
• Avoid possessives unless attached to proper nouns.

10 Key Ideas

1. Writing is a learnable professional trade that improves through rigorous self-editing rather than being an innate gift bestowed upon a lucky few at birth.
2. The ultimate golden rule of writing is absolute clarity, which is a social matter determined entirely by whether a conscientious reader can progress without stumbling.
3. Writers should begin drafting early and maintain a rich research file using structured notes and outlines to capture ideas continuously.
4. You must avoid predictable introductions and boilerplate, such as starting papers with "This paper..." or including table-of-contents roadmap paragraphs.
5. Ensure every paragraph advances the discussion with a point by telling the reader something they do not already know or believe.
6. Coherence in writing is achieved through graceful repetition and transitive sentence linkages rather than heavy transitional adverbs.
7. Writers should use active verbs and eliminate nominalizations that bury the action inside colorless nouns.
8. You must eliminate vague Latinate nouns such as concept, data, structure, and process that dilute the meaning of professional prose.
9. You should always choose concrete, singular words over abstract plurals to help the reader instantly visualize the subject.
10. Writers must untie piled-up compound nouns and adjectives, known as teutonisms, because they force the reader to stop and solve verbal puzzles.